The Edge Transport server can provide antivirus and anti-spam protection at the network perimeter. As part of your planning process, you should determine the transport features that you will enable on the Edge Transport server and how they will be configured.

When you plan for the deployment and configuration of transport features, you must clearly identify the organization's business needs and the message processing practices that best fulfill those needs. To make sure that you have all the information and resources that are required to correctly deploy and configure these features, you should ask the following questions:

Are there corporate or regulatory mandates to which your organization is required to comply?

Do messages have to be identified for long-term document retention?

Are you implementing an anti-spam solution?

Are you implementing antivirus protection?

Does your organization have to journal communications between individuals and groups?

Do certain types of messages have to be scheduled or prioritized?

Do you have to add disclaimers to the body of particular messages?

Do you have to restrict messages based on attachment size or type?

Should certain connections be rejected based on content or attachment name?

Do you have to rewrite internal Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP) addresses in order to masquerade internal subdomains?

Does your organization transmit confidential messages?

When you determine the business needs of your organization, you can determine the transport features that should be deployed. After you have made these decisions, you will know which features to configure, which agents to enable, and which storage and security resources to make available.